Google's challenger in OpenAI is finally here.
The company on Thursday launched ChatGPT Search, an evolution of the SearchGPT prototype it announced this summer. Built into OpenAI's ChatGPT platform, ChatGPT Search is designed to pull information from a variety of online sources and provide “timely answers” to questions, OpenAI said.
Powered by a fine-tuned version of OpenAI's GPT-4o model, ChatGPT Search provides information and photos from around the web, including sports scores, news, and stocks, along with links to related sources. Refine your ongoing search by asking follow-up questions.
ChatGPT chooses to search the web based on your questions. Alternatively, you can click the new web search icon and select a manual search.
Image credit: OpenAI
Answers include both inline and sidebar attributions to news publishers and other data sources with which OpenAI has license agreements. For example, a search for weekend events in San Francisco will give you summaries from local news websites, and a follow-up question for restaurant recommendations will give you a list of local options.
OpenAI said election-related inquiries will be directed to sources such as The Associated Press and Reuters.
ChatGPT Plus and Team users will initially have access to ChatGPT Search on mobile and web, while ChatGPT Search will become available to OpenAI enterprise and education customers in the coming weeks, followed by free users. will be available.
OpenAI says it will continue to improve search, especially in areas like shopping and travel, and will leverage o1's “inference” models for “deeper investigation.” The company also plans to bring ChatGPT Search to the Advanced Voice Mode feature as well as to logged out users of ChatGPT.
Image credit: OpenAI
Some publishers have protested AI-generated summaries such as ChatGPT search and Google's AI summaries, saying they can cannibalize traffic to the sites that source the information. According to one study, AI Overview can negatively impact around 25% of a publisher's traffic by de-emphasizing article links.
OpenAI said it incorporated feedback from its publisher partners on how ChatGPT Search determines which articles are most relevant to a query, as well as how it determines article summary length and citations.